To display large and complex products at sales meetings or fairs can be a challenge for industrial companies. Customers want to experience the product before purchase, yet this is not always possible due to high shipping costs and logistic problems. Virtual Reality (VR) achieved by Head-mounted Displays (HMD) is growing bigger by every day and is becoming accessible to more people. With this technology, there must be a new way to facilitate the sales process in the industry. The first goal with this master thesis was to investigate what challenges and opportunities there are in today’s sales process and develop a concept for a sales tool that uses the VR technology. The second goal was to explore how today’s technology could evolve and how the future sales process could work. To achieve these goals the Research Learning Spiral was used together with interviews and a workshop. By investigating how the sales process works in today’s industry, through interviews with people that are active in the field and a workshop, a number of challenges were identified. Three of these challenges were: to display large and complex products to the customers, to know what arguments that triggers a specific customer and to explain advantages with the product to the customer. Based on data from the interviews a prototype of a sales tool using VR was designed. The goal with the prototype was to counteract the challenges found in today’s sales process. The prototype uses a tablet where the salesman can control a 3D visualization of the product through a menu with different choices. This tablet is connected to the Samsung Gear VR, which is a VR device that uses a HMD to achieve VR, where the customer can experience the product in a virtual environment controlled by the salesman. With data from the interviews together with a conducted workshop, suggestions for the future sales process were obtained. The future sales process is very likely to use VR as a tool to both display products and to reduce traveling. The technology will possibly be smarter and be able to facilitate the sales process, for instance through artificial intelligence, smart materials and 3D printing. VR as a sales tool for large and complex products has the potential to be a great aid for the salesman during the sales process. Companies will not be required to ship large and complex products to fairs or meetings which will save money for the company and also contribute to less impact on the environment. This area of research is fairly new and there are a lot of opportunities still to be investigated.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:umu-105504 |
| Date | January 2015 |
| Creators | Sjöström, Elin |
| Publisher | Umeå universitet, Institutionen för tillämpad fysik och elektronik |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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